My family tree is pretty unconventional, at least when considering my oldest relatives. Unlike most people, who have one grandfather and one grandmother, I grew up with three grandmothers and one barely-there grandfather on my mother’s side. As of 2025, that number has dropped to two grandmothers. Of the two remaining, Marilyn and Carolyn, Marilyn is older by four years so she became my interview subject for this column. She also happens to have a much more interesting story as to why I call her grandma.
Born and raised in a small town in Nebraska, she moved to Greeley Colorado in her early twenties for her partner at the time to start a family and a life. Their partnership was short-lived, but three kids came of it. Spoiler alert: none of them are related to me but I’ll explain that later.
After the failed relationship that left her a single mother, Marilyn became a devout member of the Catholic church, gained her real estate license, and began a catering business out of her house to help make extra money on the side. As her children grew older, they grew apart from her for a variety of reasons. One of them hasn’t spoken to her in twenty years, and the other two have a touch-and-go relationship with her.
Leaning on her faith and the church was the only thing that kept her afloat in these times she told me. She went to every service she could, volunteered herself for every event, and provided food for every potluck. Living a singular life started to look like her destiny, but in the midst of making peace with this reality, came my dad and his siblings.
New to town, my dad and his four siblings started attending her church sporadically. They had just made the move from a map-dot town in Texas following the back-to-back deaths of their father and their stepfather only four years apart from each other. Looking for a new start, their mother enrolled them in a new school in a new town thousands of miles away from everything they knew. The only problem was that their mother (my biological grandmother) was falling off the deep end from a mixture of grief and extreme bipolar disorder.
She would leave my dad and his siblings alone for days on end with no signs of where she had disappeared to. In the few moments that she was present, she spent most of her time in fits of rage, disciplining the children, throwing dishes, and slamming doors. At the end of the day, all the children had was each other and the insurmountable grief of losing not just two parents but a third in such a short period.
Marilyn had noticed their on-again off-again attendance at church and their uniquely quiet mature demeanor. When she caught wind of what they were experiencing, she said it felt like it was a sign of a second chance at parenthood; a sign that a singular life wasn’t her destiny. She promptly took in my dad and all of his siblings and raised them as her own.
Now nearly forty years after this moment Marilyn is who I always considered to be my dad’s real mother, and my real grandmother. I would see my dad’s biological mom here and there but never felt connected to her or loved by her like I did Grandma Marilyn.
Her love for the church, real estate, and cooking hasn’t faltered in all these years either. She taught me everything I know about Catholicism and rosaries, what it looks like to work hard every day even when you’re way past the age of when you should’ve retired, and most importantly how to bake any recipe you could think of. Despite this, I know without a shadow of a doubt that above all she taught me that family isn’t always who you’re given but rather who you choose.
